Chapter Text
It turns out that when Lorca told Burnham that “you can transport down to the planet,” what he really meant was we. Not because he expects a repeat of P3X-524 with Burnham, and not (or not only) because Dr. Pollard has told Elan that her antennae and skin tone can’t be adequately camouflaged to remain inconspicuous on the planet, meaning that Chandavarkar and Phreen will be the primary security team. Lorca finds himself wishing that Tyler could be put back onto security when he learns that.
No, if he admits it to himself, he’s joining the away team because he wants to be that wide-eyed explorer, at least a little, and he wants to see things closer than on the bridge in orbit. He tries to sit patiently as Pollard applies the synthesized ridges to his cheekbones and around his eye sockets and lengthens his eyebrows. On the next bed, Burnham is receiving the same treatment from Culber; Chandavarkar, Phreen, and the other scientists have already been made up.
Elan, who has been lurking and watching, holds out a flat black square of metal with some kind of engraving, smaller than his fingernail. She grins. “Ever wanted to have pierced ears?”
“No,” he says.
“Too bad.”
Pollard sighs and takes the engraved square from Elan, places it against the tragus of his ear, and pinches sharply. It hurts more than it should, and when he touches it gingerly, he discovers that it’s a solid plug through the cartilage. “What’s this?” he asks, and his voice may betray some slight indicator of lingering pain.
“A beacon,” Elan tells him. She reaches over and flicks it with her fingernail—gently—and Lorca swats her hand away. Burnham has accepted her new jewelry with her usual stoicism. “Even if you’re captured and searched, we’ll be able to beam you out.”
“The people of P4X-019 appear to wear similar types of decoration,” Burnham explains. “These will help us blend in and ensure our safety. Specialist Phreen designed them.”
He supposes it makes sense that an engineer-turned-security specialist would be able to do something like that. “Are we ready now?” His cheek ridges are already starting to itch. The ear piercing is a nagging presence that his body refuses to accept.
Chandavarkar leads them to the transporter room, where Phreen is waiting with their gear. There are only six of them—himself and Burnham, Chandavarkar and Phreen, T’Lac, and a xenoanthropologist, Harding. Phreen hands out their packs, which have been modified externally to resemble the bags that the locals carry. After a final review, they step onto the transport pads.
* * *
The first thing Lorca thinks, when they arrive on the planet, is that the sky looks impossibly big. There’s probably a scientific word for the phenomenon, but whatever it is, it’s somehow both oppressive and a little terrifying. It’s cold, and it should be bleak, but everything around them is very green. When the wind shifts, a choking reek of sulfur blows across them.
“Hot springs,” Burnham says as Harding retches. “Volcanic hot springs. The nearest town appears to be powered entirely by geothermal energy.”
“That’s sulfur,” Phreen adds. “Try not to breathe in through your mouth, Harding.” She inhales deeply and doesn’t appear bothered by the smell. At Lorca’s look, she says, “I grew up in a sulfur-mining colony. Smells like home.” He didn’t know that. He doesn’t actually even know if she’s entirely alien or a human-alien hybrid. It’s a little embarrassing to realize.
“There is a town .25 kilometers away.” T’Lac almost sounds impatient. “If we wish to investigate this civilization, I suggest that we proceed in that direction.”
Chandavarkar pats his thigh almost unconsciously, and Lorca knows he’s checking for the shape of his phaser underneath his clothes. “All right,” he says. “Let’s go.”
At first, the ground is rocky, uneven, and it’s slow going. Phreen takes the lead with Harding, leaving Burnham and Lorca more or less in the middle and Chandavarkar watching with the rear with T’Lac—every scientist with a guard. Chandavarkar and T’Lac chat quietly, cheerfully, a little breathlessly, and Lorca catches Burnham smiling at them.
“They’re very…young,” she says. “They’re sweet.”
“She’s the oldest person on the ship.” Lorca keeps his voice down as he says it. He knows that it’s rude to ask a Vulcan their age, but he has reviewed all of the crew’s files, not just Burnham’s.
Burnham huffs a breathless laugh. Then she slips sideways on wet rock and grabs Lorca’s arm to keep from falling, which throws him off-balance, and they both flail for a moment before Burnham manages to regain her balance. “They’re only a few years from cadets,” she says. “We always had a lot of cadets on Shenzhou. Captain Georgiou liked training them.”
“Did you?”
They’ve reached the top of the rise. In the valley below, there’s a sprawling town; on the other side of the valley a waterfall thunders down, the spray blinding in the afternoon light. Phreen points to a road along the ridge that goes down into the valley and beckons them along it. It’s paved in huge obsidian tiles, jointed with white mud. “Cadets were—unnerving to me,” Burnham admits as she and Lorca start down the road. “They tended to be very emotional and they showed everything. They behaved illogically, even the ones who knew better. I found that it took more mental discipline to maintain my equilibrium around them.”
“It must have been a shock, to go from Vulcan to all the human illogic of Starfleet.” He adds, even more quietly, “It was a shock for me.”
There’s a herd of strange-looking cows on one side of the road, watching as they pass. A calf—for lack of a better term—is cavorting on the road, but it turns to regard them suspiciously as they get closer. It’s covered in long, thick fur, with big eyes and a rack of horns like a moose. He thinks he sees tusks too. Phreen holds up a hand and they all halt. Harding is trying to surreptitiously record video footage without startling the creature.
After a long, tense moment, the calf turns and walks off the road. Harding makes a stifled noise of joy as it walks and they see that it has six legs and a body that flows like a snake as it moves. Phreen looks around and beckons them all closer. “We’re getting close to the town,” she says softly. “Is everyone comfortable with the story?”
“Passing through on our way north to a wedding, just hoping to stay for a night,” Chandavarkar reminds them. T’Lac had come up with the wedding part of it, saying that “events to celebrate such rituals of union often bring together disparate individuals,” which would help to explain why they all looked different from each other.
“I have the forged currency,” T’Lac said, her mouth turned down in disapproval. “And I have ensured that our translators are functional and programmed with this town’s language, though I suspect there may be some difficulties”
When Burnham looks at him, her eyes are almost dancing. “All right then,” she says.
“Go,” he confirms, though it doesn’t seem like anyone was really waiting for it. Chandavarkar is in charge of security and Burnham is in charge of the scientists and he is…superfluous.
There’s a hum as they walk into town, like the sound of a great engine. “They must be drawing power from the waterfall,” Burnham says quietly. Another road branches off, lined by what look like strange mounds. When he touches his elbow to Burnham’s and gestures toward them, she says, “When we scanned the planet, we saw a lot of large spaces just below the surface, but the shape was man-made. I think these are…homes. Dug into the earth, to take advantage of the geothermal heating. I don’t think it gets much warmer than this during the year.”
Past the homes, the town is very busy. The road is full of people and strange vehicles alike—some of the people dressed like they are, in quilted cloth jackets and pants, but others in layer upon layer of furs. One woman wears a dress that appears to be entirely made of the long tails of some furry animal stitched together into thick vertical stripes, coupled with a fur headwrap, her elegant neck exposed to the air. The vehicles are unfamiliar, three-wheeled with steaming engines and only enough space enough for the driver and a cramped passenger. Sometimes larger wagons come rumbling through, pulled by the six-legged creatures they’d seen. Wires hang heavy from poles everywhere, criss-crossing between roofs and balconies.
“Pardon me,” a man says as he nearly bumps into Harding, and then stops and stares at all of them.
“Are you all right?” Harding asks.
“Steady earth and steady water to you, my friend,” he says. “You’re travelling?”
“Yes, we are, to attend a marriage ceremony in the north,” Harding says. “It’s obvious that we’re travelers?” Lorca hears that strangle medley of native language and English that happens sometimes when the universal translator is still learning a new language.
The man nods. “You should outfit yourselves better, if you want to spend time in town,” he warns. “There, go now.” He points at a store up the road, whose windows are full of bright clothing beneath a sign flashing in neon. “You’ll have better luck finding a place to stay if you do.”
“Thank you. Steady earth and steady water to you as well,” Harding says.
“He’s right.” Chandavarkar looks around. “We must be dressed as…laborers or something. The people dressed like us get out of the way when the other people walk past.”
“I suppose we’ll find out if the money’s any good.” Phreen raises her eyebrows. “Well? Shall we go shopping?”
‘Steady earth and steady water’ appears to be the customary greeting here. The shopkeeper looks askance at their outfits when they enter, but T’Lac manages to flash a large handful of their distasteful forged currency and the man becomes much more accommodating.
They emerge transformed. Soft cloth is only for the poor, Lorca discovers. He ends up all in black leather, the kind of thing he might have worn in the Terran universe, though his coat is lined with some kind of fur. Burnham is wearing black leather too, and for all that she’s dressed the way Michael used to, she doesn’t look a thing like Michael. The others opt for fur—it allows both Phreen and Chandavarkar to hide their weapons easily—except T’Lac, their vegetarian Vulcan. Harding speaks to the shopkeeper on her behalf and she emerges in a billowy suit of some kind of iridescent material. They have to keep their packs, incongruous now but worse to risk losing.
Out on the street again, Harding points one street over. “The keeper told me that we’d find acceptable lodgings on the next street,” he says. “He said that they’d be better quality than those available on this street.”
The next street over is quieter, free of the loud steam-cars and rattling wagons. The wires above the street are strung neatly, orderly. The street are lined with lampposts that are topped with large bulbs made of some kind of smoky crystals. “That one seems fine,” Lorca says, gesturing to the nearest building. It’s faced in obsidian and has a very small sign that says gistihús, which Harding assures them means hotel. He looks to the others for any kind of disagreement, but no one speaks up to object.
It's almost surprising how similar it is to the hotels he’s seen depicted in advertisements for travel destinations on Earth. The entry room, for lack of a better word, is very quiet. There’s a sign that he can’t read on one of the doors, but when a man opens it, steam billows out. At a round central desk, a man dressed entirely in white fur looks at them and says, “Three rooms?”
Lorca looks at them too. Of course they’re still more or less paired off the way that they were when walking into town. The man is already handing them three keys that look hand-forged. “I recommend our outdoor baths,” he says, and then points them toward their rooms.
Lorca meets Burnham’s eyes. There are ways to do this. Women in one room, men in the other, Lorca in the third. Or security team, science team, Lorca in the third. “It would look strange for us to split off in a different way than we are now,” Chandavarkar says.
“I am in agreement.” T’Lac doesn’t smile, but he suddenly has a flash of suspicion that Elan has put T’Lac up to something. “Based on my observations of the local population, I believe that the group configurations least likely to catch attention are those in which we already stand. Our dissimilar physical appearances do not suggest a biological family group. The next logical interpretation of our group would be romantic. I see nothing to indicate that romantic groupings of more than two individuals are acceptable in this society. That requires us to perform as pairs. I have observed only heterosexual pairings. Logically, we should proceed in these pairs until some other disguise becomes more useful.” T’Lac gestures to Burnham. “Captain, you should share a room with Burnham.”
He knew it was coming and he still can’t keep himself from looking over at Burnham to see how she’ll react. When she catches him looking, she quirks her eyebrow and smiles and he thinks briefly that if the local population decides to chase them down and kill them tomorrow, at least he’ll have spent the night with Burnham again. “All right,” he says. “Take what you need most, leave the packs in the room. Let’s find somewhere to eat, if it’s safe to eat…?”
Harding nods. “Yes, sir,” he says. “Based on the readings I’ve taken so far, our biology is sufficiently similar to digest the local food. I can’t promise it’ll taste good, though.”
“Digestion in a place where we can continue observing is all that I ask,”
* * *
Harding proves his usefulness by talking to enough locals to find an eating-house that’s meant to be good but not the kind of place where they’ll have to perform too much. It’s back on the busy street—aðalverslunargata, Harding tells them, and Lorca isn’t willing to try to pronounce that even in his head—and it has a neon sign advertising MATUR, which Harding tells them means “food.” Lorca supposes it’s good that xenolinguists like him still exist for when the universal translator struggles to keep up.
Inside, the walls are mosaics, some abstract—though for all he knows, they’re of deep religious significance—and some more clearly representative of the town, the people, great clouds of steam rising from the ground. It’s dim but not dark, with long corkscrewing pipes of patterned glass set into the ceiling and full of light. They find an empty table that seats eight and fill it. Harding picks up what must be a menu and says, “I’ll order for all of us unless you want to guess what it says.”
“No,” Lorca says, in case someone is about to disagree. “You’re our best chance of eating something better than just digestible.” When a server comes to their table with mugs of…something, Harding reads out a string of words that the universal translator doesn’t even try to translate.
T’Lac takes a very small sip of the beverage. “I believe you will find it acceptable,” she says. “It appears to be a mildly alcoholic beverage.”
Lorca finds himself lifting his own mug to toast. “Here’s to my crew,” he says. “And the wedding.” He gets some strange looks, but everyone lifts their mugs and drinks. It’s hot and sweet and barely tastes of alcohol, which probably means that it’s dangerous.
Two people in somewhat more worn furs approach their table. The man (Lorca is guessing) asks, “May we join you?”
“Steady earth and steady water,” Lorca remembers to say. “Please do.”
They introduce themselves as Guðmundur and Ketill. The restaurant is loud and the two men is seated far enough away that he can’t quite hear what they’re saying to Harding and Chandavarkar, but he does hear when one asks, “Where are you traveling?”
“To a marriage ceremony, further north,” Lorca tells them. He hears the translator stutter and provide the word “brúðkaupsveisla” for “marriage ceremony” and is very glad that he let Harding order for them.
“Congratulations!” Ketill says. “Who is getting married?”
There is, for a moment, an alarming silence at their table. Apparently no one thought that they might be asked for any more information about the alleged wedding. “My sister,” Lorca says, when no one else comes up with an answer quickly enough. “My sister. Erin.”
“Wonderful!” Ketill drinks his own drink quickly and takes Guðmundur’s for himself. “Wonderful, to have a sister married. Did you approve of her husband-to-be?”
“It’s been a long time since I saw her. I don’t know the man, but if she chose him, I’m sure he’s good.”
“You allowed her to choose her own?” Ketill sounds shocked. Apparently that’s not the normal custom.
“In our town, that’s how it’s done,” he says. “The woman chooses the man.” He wonders if Burnham can tell whether he’s telling the truth about Erin. “Everyone is happy that way.”
“Except the man who isn’t chosen!” Ketill chortles. He’s finished Guðmundur’s drink and is signaling to the server for another one.
“His name is John.” Lorca doesn’t know why he’s saying this when the men clearly don’t care. “He—he studies the stars.” It’s the best way he can think of describe a scientist.
That must have translated in a way that he didn’t intend, because Ketill bursts out laughing again and says something that sounds like an insult. “I apologize for him,” Guðmundur says. “It’s been a long day.”
* * *
The restaurant’s proprietor directs them to the popular public hot springs. It isn’t quite the muddy reeking hole that Lorca had anticipated, based on those first sulfuric breaths on the planet. The spring itself is the size of a small lake, dotted throughout with small islands, some lit by the strange crystal lights. It’s open to the stars, though the sky is cloudy now. The cloudy water glows faintly, an unnatural shade of blue, some areas brighter than others. There are people throughout, some talking in groups, some resting or standing in silent contemplation, some in the shadows.
“The water is piped in,” T’Lac says. She’s gotten a stack of towels from a man selling them out of a booth near the entrance. “From another hot spring that is dangerously hot. They keep a temperature gauge in the water and a pipe of cooler water, and the gauge triggers a switch in pipes depending on the temperature of the water. And the steam from the excessively hot water is routed to the central boiler that lights the city.”
“So there is a massive engine running,” Chandavarkar says.
“Several. They divert water from the waterfall and use the natural geothermal energy to heat it to produce steam. They’re not far from a geyser, which suggests that their ‘steady earth and steady water’ greeting is related to past natural phenomena.” T’Lac passes out what he’d thought were towels, but they’re lengths of silky cloth. “I was informed that these are the only thing to be worn while in the hot spring.”
“…Worn where?” Chandavarkar asks. In the reflected glow of the spring, it looks like he’s blushing.
“Wrapped around the waist.” She sounds impatient. “To hide the genitals. It appears that on this planet there is no distinction between genders regarding clothing expectations.”
Lorca is too dismayed to notice how the others are reacting. Now that he looks harder, yes, everyone appears to be topless in the spring. It shouldn’t be an issue. He’s not the kind of captain—of man—to be leering at any of his team members, whatever their gender and whether or not he’s had sex with them.
But it’s an issue. When they’ve all changed—separately—and re-emerge, his entire awareness is centered on Burnham. The glow of the spring, coupled with those smoky crystal lights, casts strange shadows everywhere. They step down into the spring and the others scatter, Phreen and Harding off to find more locals to talk to, T’Lac undoubtedly to inspect the water itself under Chandavarkar’s guard. He expects, or assumes, that Burnham will go with them. But she stays close to him as he steps slowly forward. Beneath his feet is soft silty mud, and the water itself has a strange texture to it, almost heavy and thick. He can only see maybe an inch below the surface. A faint hint of sulfur pervades everything, but he’s grown accustomed to it.
They wander through the spring, avoiding the small knots of people talking and laughing together. He sees more piercings than were on display at the restaurant—tags and rings and plugs in nipples, any fold of skin, even some that appear set into the bone. “Maybe we should’ve asked Doctor Pollard for more metal,” he says softly.
Burnham hmmms in response. “I’m sure Elan would have enjoyed helping install that too.” There’s a hint of a laugh deep in her voice. “Here,” she says, and they’ve reached one edge of the spring. He runs his hand over the edge and finds that it’s some kind of concrete. Burnham sits on what must be some kind of bench in the water, and he imagines stepping forward—
He doesn’t step forward. When she sits, the water comes just to the tops of her shoulders. He doesn’t sit beside her either, but he crouches down just a little in the water, so that it laps at his shoulders the same way it does hers. “Burnham,” he says. Light flashes off her ear tag and he asks, “Are we sure the water won’t damage these?”
She reaches out and strokes her fingers over his own tag and he feels it deep in his body. The sense of anticipation is almost suffocating. “They were tested,” she assures him, and it’s hard for him to do anything but look at her lips, at the curves of her breasts just below the water, but he nods.
Someone runs into him and then laughs and says “Sorry!” and when he turns in annoyance, it’s Phreen, laughing at him. “I’m watching Harding,” she says. She points at the kid, who’s maintaining a surprising amount of composure while talking to three different people at once.
It’s hard for him to form words beyond incoherent frustration. “I assumed, Specialist. Keep watching him.”
“Yessir,” she says and swims away toward Harding.
“That was unnecessary.”
“Her interruption or my order?”
“Both,” Burnham says. She begins to stretch her arms above her head, then seems to think better of it and leans back against the wall, head resting on the side and face tilted upward.
They’re silent for too long, the weight of it increasing, and Lorca casts about for anything to say that isn’t a complete abdication of good sense. He finally finds something and says, “You’ve mentioned Tucker and T’Pol a few times, doing the neuro-pressure. Quite a few, considering that as far as history’s concerned, Tucker died not too long after Enterprise’s mission ended.”
Burnham lifts her head, looks at him, raises an eyebrow. She’s not fooled. “Yes, as far as history is concerned, he did.” He can see the steam rising off her shoulders, and it must be from his own too, from the way that she runs her eyes over his body.
“There’s some extremely classified information that suggests something else might have happened.”
Her mouth twitches into a smile, something a little more ordinary than whatever has been going on. “Do you have a question, Captain?”
“Did you know them on Vulcan somehow?”
She spreads her arms behind her against the wall of the hot spring. It’s started to rain a little. “My mother Amanda—she knew Trip well. He was the only other human living on Vulcan when she moved there with Sarek. She sought him out and she realized very quickly that he was more than T’Pol’s…gardener. I believe they bonded over the experience of being a human married to a Vulcan.”
“Not many people do that, I’m guessing.”
Burnham blinks and brushes away the raindrops clinging to her eyelashes. “No, not at all. I believe my mother and Sarek may have been only the second. And she saw quickly after that that their children were—well, their children. The first human-Vulcan hybrids. Trip was…like a grandfather to her, I think.”
He looks away from Burnham and draws his hand through the water to watch it swirl. “And to you?”
“I think he wanted to be a grandfather to me too. A human grandfather, not a forefather. But within a year or so of my arrival on Vulcan, I was trying to be a Vulcan. I remember that my parents took Spock and me to their home to celebrate Christmas, when I was thirteen. He was very old by then, but he and my mother were enjoying themselves so much, putting ugly decorations onto the wrong kind of tree. Sarek and T’Pol were at the other end of the room, talking to each other, and T’Mir and Lorian and Spock were all over there with them, and you could tell that all of them were sort of resigned to the whole thing, but almost affectionately. My mother and Trip kept trying to beckon me over to help them decorate the tree, and I remember wanting to go to them, and being angry at myself for it and then angry at myself for being angry, but I didn’t feel like I could go to stand with the Vulcans either.”
Lorca pretends that it’s the current of the hot springs that pushes him forward enough for his knee to press briefly against Burnham’s. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“I went to my mother eventually, of course.” She blinks a few times, quickly.
“Of course you did. She’s your mother. She read human books to you to make you feel better about being lost.” Maybe it isn’t obvious to Burnham. “It was the logical choice,” he tells her, and offers a half-smile.
Burnham kicks him underwater, and the heavy water slows her foot until it lands as soft pressure against Lorca’s thigh. “My choice wasn’t based on a logical analysis of the situation.”
He sees Chandavarkar and T’Lac making their way through the spring toward them. “Can’t it be the logical choice even if you don’t use logic to make it in the moment?” They both know he’s not talking about her decision at her childhood Christmas.
“I don’t know,” Burnham says. She steps off the bench and stands in the water. Then she asks, “T’Lac, can a choice later be determined to be the logical choice if one does not employ logic in making it?” Her voice takes on that Vulcan cadence.
T’Lac considers. “Such an assessment involves seeking a post-hoc justification for an action driven by something other than logic. If the choice is not made in the first instance using logic, one has not made ‘the logical choice.’ One could accurately describe it afterwards as ‘the choice that would have been logical,’ but a conditional phrasing should be used to make clear that it was not logical in its inception.” She relents. “If you are asking whether the phrase ‘the logical choice’ can fairly be applied to a choice made that would have been logical, I believe that is a matter of the speaker and the audience. To a human—” and she’s clearly addressing Lorca when she says it “—it might appear that the phrase ‘a logical choice’ denotes both such choices and choices actually made using logic. To a Vulcan, such a descriptor would be imprecise at best and incorrect at worst.”
“Thank you, Ensign,” he says. “Have you learned anything interesting?”
“Yes.”
After a moment of silence, Chandavarkar says, “We’ve learned a lot, but I think we can wait to report on it. We just wanted to make sure everything was fine over here before we went to explore further.”
Lorca would like a way to answer that beyond “Yes, go away and don’t come back,” but he settles for “I appreciate your diligence. Don’t leave the hot spring enclosure.” They melt back into the crowd.
“You can sit on the bench,” Burnham tells him. “I know you prefer to have the wall at your back.”
“I’m trying to grow as a person,” he says, but he does take the spot that she had occupied. They’re in something of a dark alcove, if a lake could have alcoves, and he realizes that he’s calmer as soon as he can see what’s coming, who’s looking at them—no one, at the moment.
Burnham stands in front of him now, close enough that her knees brush his own, and his legs fall open almost automatically. The water feels even heavier now as she edges closer, until she’s pressed against his inner thighs, and he doesn’t know what she’s doing but he’s never going to stop her. “Gabriel,” she says softly, like it’s a secret. She reaches out and brushes her fingers against the metal tag again and he wants to turn his head and suck her fingers into his mouth.
“Michael Burnham.” Under the water, he lets his hands find her hips, but he doesn’t pull her that last inch to where he’s desperately hard now.
It’s raining harder now and she blinks water from her eyes again and smiles at him. He wonders if there was some kind of parasite in the food that’s made her heedless, but there’s no one near them and anyway he’s beginning to lose situational awareness. Her own hands glide up his inner thighs but don’t creep below the wrap; instead, she strokes the backs of her knuckles across the thin layer of cloth stretched tight across him and he can’t prevent the strangled groan that escapes him, the way his hands clench tighter on her hips. She doesn’t stop, and his own hips jerk forward almost involuntarily, seeking more pressure. Lorca slides his hands up her torso to find her breasts, pinches her nipple until she closes her eyes and bucks against him and moans, and he loses all reason, grips her hips and lifts her up until she’s kneeling on the bench straddling him.
Burnham settles exactly where he wants her and grinds down against him. He holds her there with one hand slid down beneath the back of the wrap and she groans, digs her hand into his hair and pulls his head forward to lick the rainwater off that same nipple, lets him lick over and over again but pulls him back by the hair if he tries to do anything else. He slides his hand further down and presses her tight against him, and she makes a quiet little noise as she grinds down harder, hips searching for friction in the buoyancy of the water. She finds it, or enough of it to rock back and forth, breath coming faster and faster, until he bites her nipple and feels her spasm against him. He’s dizzy by now and he says, “You’re trying to kill me.”
She smiles again and she starts to work her fingers down under the fabric of his wrap. For a single blinding moment he has a vision of her ducking underwater to take him in her mouth and letting him thrust helplessly, mindlessly, until he comes down her throat—
Someone coughs loudly, as though they’ve done it several times to try to catch his attention, and he sees clearly enough to realize that Chandavarkar is standing some distance away, steadfastly facing in the other direction. “I’m sorry, sir,” he says, still facing away. “But it appears there’s a curfew in effect. Everyone who entered without showing a resident’s pass has to leave now.”
There may be words to describe Lorca’s first thoughts in response, but English isn’t filthy enough to capture them. Burnham seems to have heard Chandavarkar at the same time that he did and has slid off him. He feels like he’s dying. He probably is dying.
But his only option is to try to brazen through it and so he stands painfully and thanks god that the water is too cloudy for anyone to see his situation. “All right,” he says, and he barely recognizes his own voice. He sounds…wrecked. He looks at Burnham and she raises an eyebrow in—challenge? They’re about to spend the night together. She looks around, letting her gaze rest meaningfully on the other darkened areas of the hot spring, and he follows her gaze, sees the movement, hears the soft and not-so-soft noises, wonders how many couples Chandavarkar accidentally disturbed before he found them. T'Lac, Harding, and Phreen join them on their way to the exit—Phreen must have been babysitting the two scientists. By the time they make it there, Lorca can climb out of the water with the rest of them.
He doesn’t know how he makes it from the booths where they wash off the mineral water to putting his clothes back on to walking back to their lodgings to parting with the others. His brain skips ahead to when he walks into the room behind Burnham and closes the door and then she pushes him up against the wall and drops to her knees and drags his pants down far enough to suck him into her mouth.
Lorca hits his own head against the door and puts his hand on the back of her head as gently as he can manage. Her mouth is even hotter than the rest of her body and she hums a little and he says “Fuck, fuck, Burnham” and “god the things I want to do with you.”
Burnham pulls off just enough so that she can look up at him through her eyelashes and say, “What things?” against the head before taking him down even deeper and he can barely form thoughts.
“Everything,” he says. “Everything,” and he means it. He moves his hand to her cheek, feels the way her lips are stretched tight, and then he comes and his vision whites out. As a way to die, it wouldn’t be the worst.
* * *
When he can think again, he’s sitting on the floor leaning against the door. Burnham offers him a glass of water and sits down next to him. “Everything,” she says.
Lorca drinks the full glass, water spilling from the edges of his mouth, and then struggles his way out of his jacket. “Burnham,” he says, “Don’t tell me it’s a surprise.” He turns his head and finds her face very close to his own.
“No.” Her dark eyes are fixed on him.
It’s hard to say it. “Don’t—do this, and then decide to find out something else about me, and then stop.” His voice rasps. “Don’t do that again.”
Burnham leans in and kisses him very gently. Then she rests her forehead against his own. “No,” she says. “I won’t.” Then she adds, “We don’t need to spend the night on the floor.”
He laughs at that a little and they stand up together. They help each other out of their clothes—maybe more hindrance than help sometimes, struggling with unfamiliarly-shaped buttons, peeling the leather away from damp skin—and lay the clothes by the heating vents, and then they’re in bed together on strangely slippery sheets, legs tangled together, and it’s nothing they haven’t done before but it all feels new somehow. Burnham kisses him with no particular intent but affection as they lie there, his mouth, the tip of his nose, touches him like she’s been waiting for months just to have her hands on him. He doesn’t think he’s smiled so much since…ever, really.
“I don’t have a lot of experience with this.” She tells him like she’s confiding a secret, but she smiles as she says it.
“Yes,” he says, “I think you’ve told me. Quite a few times.” She arches her eyebrow and he leans in to kiss it. “You seem to imagine that I do.”
“You’ve been in love,” she says, and that knocks him breathless for a moment, the implication.
“It wasn’t—the same.” How to explain it? “I told you, nothing was safe there. There was no—no kindness. I couldn’t trust—her.” He finally settles on, “Love was different there,” and it might be the first time he’s ever said the word aloud.
“I trust you,” Burnham says, and he feels the weight behind it. “I trust you.” She doesn’t qualify it this time.
He kisses her eyebrow again. “I’ve trusted you since the beginning,” he says against her forehead. “I don’t have a lot of experience with this either, Burnham.”
“Logically,” she starts, and he smiles, “it would be better if one of us did.”